So what is it with all this East Germany crap anyway?
At the time of the June Revolution of 2004, we talked a lot about the best metaphor for the division of Talossa. It was quite easy back in the old days when King Robert was still ruling the Kingdom. Obviously, the other side of the border was the place with the sham democracy, the cruelty, the bullying, the ostracism of dissenters, the prison-camp atmosphere... East Germany, North Korea, perhaps even Northern Ireland during the Unionist one-party state of 1922-69.
Today, the Kingdom of Talossa is a thriving democracy (although, as I see it, seriously flawed by the non-secret voting system). The Republic of today is smaller, weaker, poorer in resources, attracting fewer new citizens. And yet we dare to carry on anyway.
In that sense we, the Republic, are now "East Germany" - not the real DDR of Russian troops on street corners, omnipresent surveillance, shortages, corrupt government by a self-perpetuating clique of hypocritical bureaucrats, and most importantly, no-one getting shot for trying to leave. But perhaps we have something in common with the imaginary DDR of the Ostalgie movement - we know all the weakness and relative lacks of our Republic. And yet we dare to go on existing, and defending our differences and our uniqueness. Ár Repúblicâ amadâ, non c'è 'n estat grült e∂a riceu. Más c'è ár estat.
(The thing about the GDR, as opposed to all the other bureacratic regimes propped in Eastern Europe by force of arms, was of course that the end of party-dictatorship meant not a new country, but the end of the country itself. Especially since the GDR had given up on the rhetoric of German unity from 1973. This was a fate that it shared with Yugoslavia, and likewise the GDR and Yugoslav party dictatorships weren't nearly as sadistic and terroristic as, say, real totalitarian regimes like Stalin's Russia or Ceauscescu's Romania. That's why you get popular nostalgia for the GDR and the SFRY that you don't get for other Stalinist regimes - except in Russia, and that's not nostalgia for the Soviet Union per se, but nostalgia for being the most feared superpower on the globe and being able to frighten the Americans. But I digress...)
Yes, the Kingdom is larger, stronger, and more inviting in many ways that our own version of Talossa. But the PVZT - and probably all the other Republican Talossans - declares that our own citizenship, our own institutions, and even our own relative weakness and shortages are worth fighting for. And that Talossan unity must come one day, but in the form of a merging between two historical traditions, not the Anschluss of one by the other. The story will end differently here, if we have anything to say about it.
